Project Almanac

***DISCLAIMER*** The following review is entirely my opinion. If you comment (which I encourage you to do) be respectful. If you don't agree with my opinion (or other commenters), that's fine. To each their own. These reviews are not meant to be statements of facts or endorsements, I am just sharing my opinions and my perspective when watching the film and is not meant to reflect how these films should be viewed. Finally, the reviews are given on a scale of 0-5. 0, of course, being unwatchable. 1, being terrible. 2, being not great. 3, being okay. 4, being great and 5, being epic! And if you enjoy these reviews feel free to share them and follow the blog or follow me on Twitter (@RevRonster) for links to my reviews and the occasional live-Tweet session of the movie I'm watching!  Gotta go back in time...and maybe not watch this one...or at least wait a lot longer before I do.

Project Almanac ? 2 out 5

If you follow the blog and are a loyal reader of my silly little reviews, you might have gathered that I?m not the biggest fan of the ?found footage? sub-genre and you might have noticed that I remind everyone of this fact literally every time I review one.  There was a time when you couldn?t escape these damn things and thanks to the insane success of the first Paranormal Activity, a ?found footage? horror film was seemingly released about every hour for a good few years.  Rarely do you see this sub-genre take existence in realms that aren?t meant to scare you so it comes as a breath of fresh air when that does occur.  When I saw the trailer for Project Almanac, I thought it looked pretty cool and was hoping it would be a slick, non-scary approach to the often formulaic and too often underutilized fertile ground that exists in ?found footage.?  Eh, sadly, my expectations were kinda dashed.

Pictured:  Time travel...I guess.

This picture will travel through time and post itself later
in the review.

David (Jonny Weston) is a brilliant high school student who has a bright future ahead of him but a financially troubled family next to him.  He hopes he can get a scholarship to an excellent school because his mother can?t afford to pay for his education but things don?t look so well when he gets accepted into the school he wants but the financial aid doesn?t come through.  However, the answer to his problems arrive in a very unconventional way?in their basement, they discover that his wayward father had invented a time machine but wasn?t able to perfect it and get it working.  Using the help of his mighty brain and with the assistance of his sister Christina (Virginia Gardner), his buddies; Quinn (Sam Lerner) and Adam (Allen Evangelista) and the woman he has a crush on; Jessie (Sofia Black), the group figures out the machine?s secrets and they proceed to party with time itself and it seems that David is going to get everything he wants.  However, they soon learn that their meddling has some repercussions and creates a ripple effect through time, leaving death and terror in the new timeline they?ve created.  Now it seems that David is left with a choice:  Correct everything they?ve done and lose what he?s gained or leave it as is and see what other damage has been done.

Why are all time travel devices made from easy to get items?  What is hiding in my
junk drawer that I can use to travel back in time with?

The movie starts off fun enough and it seems like the movie might be enjoyable.  However, as the film progresses, the story becomes less enjoyable as the movie focuses too much on teenagers trying to have a good time with time travel than it is with worrying about having a conflict the group has to overcome.  Granted, unlike other time travel films (and this movie will forcefully remind you of every, single, solitary time travel film ever made), Project Almanac showcases the small, petty things a normal person?especially a teenager?would do if they had access to a time machine.  The kids go back and use their knowledge win the lottery, make bullies look bad, party at a concert and just go back and fix missed opportunities that would otherwise normally just become memories of regret that only show up when you are trying to get to sleep at night.  This part of the feature is amusing and a sorta realistic approach to time travel when in the hands of kids who aren?t of the legal drinking age but it?s clear that this dynamic is the main focus of the film and it starts to get tedious and makes the film feel like it is going nowhere.

At least they are wearing proper goofy sci-fi personal protection equipment.

The film also loses points for having characters that lack depth.  Each character is barely developed beyond their one-dimensional skill set for the group.  David gets the honor of being the smart one and the one that gets the girl so he gets a little more depth than the rest but the other members are basically the sister, the friends and the crush.  Throughout the movie, we learn very little about them and only learn a fractional more about David's and his sister?s background.  The story already feels like it has no weight or importance due to the emphasis on partying so adding characters that feel one-dimensional, bland and flavorless made it extra difficult to fully invest in the action and it made the already cheesy and forced love angle that is being played out feel all that more pointless.

Told ya.

Additionally, like so many other ?found footage? films, the element of having everything play out through the perspective of the teens? POV and through their cameras feels superfluous.  There are a few minor times when it makes sense like when they are documenting the time travel experiments or filming David?s video he?s sending with his college application but, overall, this element feels unnecessary.  Too often events are completely incomprehensible due to the shaking of the camera and it raises too many questions?the sorta ?I?m looking too deep into this narrative but it?s bothering me" type of questions.  Questions like who actually found the footage and edited it together?  And speaking of editing, did they bring along microphones to isolate audio because there are a lot of times when natural sound and dialogue is captured perfectly during chaotic and choppy sequences and shots filmed from a few dozen feet away?  Why did they feel a need to ?document? scenes of David courting Jessica since that had nothing to do with the experiments of traveling through time?  More importantly, how on earth is the camera capturing memories when the kids travel back in time?  And if these aren?t memories but edited in footage done in post, why did the mysterious person who edited this and released it presumably on the internet take the time to create this bit of emotional narrative?  Now, I fully realize these are nitpicky complaints and some of them are things only a guy who knows too much about movies or has editing experience would even notice and that is true and I won?t deny that.  I have a history of sound editing (I use to work for the dying medium called commercial radio) and these things do stand out but they do affect my ability to completely submerge myself in the story.  These little mistakes and plot holes make it really hard to suspend my disbelief and one of the biggest reasons I just can?t get into ?found footage? films.

The hardest part to believe was the fact that he didn't draw a dick on his past self.

For all my complaints and the tedium that I started to feel while watching the film, there were elements that I enjoyed.  For example, even though the characters aren?t written with much depth, the actors are all doing a very good job.  Finally, the special effects in the film are fantastic!  However, aside from this, I just didn?t see that much in this film.

In the pre-digital age, being erased from time just meant fading away.  Now, with smartphones,
social media and toilets with Bluetooth technology, even disappearing from time gets digital.

With all my nitpicking about Project Almanac, I did see some promise in the film.  There was definitely a flashy and fun film hiding in the final product but it was lost in a boring story, lifeless characters, a lack of an interesting conflict and a presentation that was more distracting than it was helpful or conducive to compelling story telling.  I had hoped for something from this film but, in the end, just found a film that held potential but just ended up boring me.

Unfriended

***DISCLAIMER*** The following review is entirely my opinion. If you comment (which I encourage you to do) be respectful. If you don't agree with my opinion (or other commenters), that's fine. To each their own. These reviews are not meant to be statements of facts or endorsements, I am just sharing my opinions and my perspective when watching the film and is not meant to reflect how these films should be viewed. Finally, the reviews are given on a scale of 0-5. 0, of course, being unwatchable. 1, being terrible. 2, being not great. 3, being okay. 4, being great and 5, being epic! And if you enjoy these reviews feel free to share them and follow the blog or follow me on Twitter (@RevRonster) for links to my reviews and the occasional live-Tweet session of the movie I'm watching!  Don't worry, this isn't a movie about getting rid of your racist friends or that person who gets mad at you for not agreeing with them so they get rid of you on Facebook and try to add you again in about a week.

Unfriended ? 2 out of 5

When I first heard that there was going to be a horror film about a vengeful spirit of a bullied girl who torments some kids until she murders them AND the film would be shown entirely through a video chat session online, I was skeptical but intrigued.  My first thoughts were that the film could either be great and unique or unique and completely awful.  In the end, Unfriended ended up being a bit of the latter.

Look again, you perverts...it's not what you think.

I'm no expert on suicide but who holds the gun like
that when they decide to end it all?

The film opens with a internet viral video of a girl named Laura (Heather Sossaman) committing suicide after her friends uploaded a video of her getting super wasted and then, subsequently, ended up being harassed endlessly online by her classmates and told she should kill herself.  A year after her suicide, a former friend of Laura?s named Blaire (Shelley Hennig) logs online to video chat with her friends:  Adam (Will Peltz), Val (Courtney Halverson), Jess (Renee Olstead), Ken (Jacob Wysocki?who, by the way, is awesome in Terri and Fat Kid Rules the World.  I highly recommend those films) and her boyfriend Mitch (Mosses Storm?who had a badass name, by the way).  A mysterious and unidentified sixth person enters the video chat and Blaire starts to get messages from Laura?s Facebook page.  Soon, the friends are forced to admit their sins against the dead woman or they will have to answer for them with their lives.

Ken decided to go full Chris Farley...and his friends seem to love it.

As I stated, I found this film to be not-so-great.  I won?t go as far as saying it is horrible but I definitely didn?t find the film frightening or scary in any way.  I will, however, go as far as saying the film actually had potential and I applaud the film with trying something new in a genre that is built on an overly solid foundation of doing the same thing over and over again.  Even more amazing is how the film openly embraced technology to try and tell a scary tale.  Horror films are not ones to really fully embrace our growing digital age?think of how long it took for the genre to admit people have cell phones on them at all times and had to come up with reasons why the victims aren?t immediately calling 9-1-1 when the shit gets freaky.  It took the genre forever to acknowledge that video recorders exists and could be used to document supposed hauntings and the second they realized this could happen we were endlessly belted in the face with ?found footage? films that all basically look the same.

Can your heart handle the suspense of waiting on a response in an
instant messenger chat window?!?

Granted, the genre will make stupid films that try to make cars murdering machines or there will be entire films dedicated to the murderous intent of everyday household appliances like refrigerators or beds but these are just lazy writers trying to come up quick ideas or Stephen King proving that he ran out of ideas a long time ago.  Rarely do we see horror that actively embraces technology as a format to TELL a horror story and, more often than not, they use technology to BE the story.  This is where I found Unfriended to be really intriguing.  Having it in this format made for an interesting way of having a story unfold and it allowed for truly unique ways for character development to occur.  For example, the film is shown entirely from what Blaire is seeing on her screen and when we see her instant messaging her boyfriend we often see her initially type her true feelings but she will immediately delete it to type something much more vague or even dismissive.  This was truly a neat way to get insight on the character without going the route of inner monologue being broadcast to the audience.

It's exactly as exciting as real group video chat...also, suspension of disbelief
was completely lost when Blaire goes to Chatroulette and there isn't
one douche asking to see her boobs or flashing his naughty bits.
So much for reality, movie!

Ultimately, however, the film?s presentation ends up being the film?s undoing because it takes away the thing that makes horror films scary; it makes you a passive participant and not an active one.  When horror films put you, the viewer, into the action that is how the scares often arrive because you are neck deep in the danger and right next to the victim right before Jason Voorhees machetes a person in the face.  The internet has desensitized us to a lot of things and made us very jaded (unless we see a video that says ?What happens next will leave you in tears? and then we suddenly find are easily lost faith in humanity).  We no longer feel sympathy for videos of people getting hurt or injured to the point that you probably just witnessed video evidence of a person dying.  We see these videos are a source of humor because we are not there in person experiencing the awful events.  The internet and YouTube have made us passive viewers who don?t see this as people getting hurt but rather as faceless nobodies there to make us laugh.  It is this mentality that made it hard to really feel any sense of dread or horror when the characters get killed off because it is barely any different than a video of someone doing something stupid that Daniel Tosh cracks jokes about on a weekly basis on Comedy Central or the million of other shows that are exactly the same as The Soup and Tosh.0.

I was, however, worried for Jacob Wysocki because he's just a good actor
and, in turn, that made me care for his character a little more than the rest.

Caring for the victims in a horror film is pretty much essential and that?s why the 70s pretty much gave birth to the Golden Virgin.  When everyone is doing terrible things, it is the pure and kind-hearted person that lives and escapes the figurative devil that is out to make you pay for the sins you?ve committed.  This has been parodied over the years but, at least for me, I need at least one character to care about and actively cheer for and hope they don?t die a terrible death.  In the end, that character is metaphorically me and I am living through them when I watch a horror film and I really don?t want to watch them die because that's me dying.  Unfriended doesn?t have the Golden Virgin and, instead, takes part in the growing fade of filling up a film?s cast of characters with grotesquely unlikable and asshole-ish characters.  No one in this film has any real good qualities about them.  They are nothing but a bunch of petty people who routinely attack each other, stab each other in the back and all-around treat the ones they call friends like shit.  I felt no sympathy for them and, in turn, was cheering the dead spirit of Laura to make them all pay.  They were awful and, since they were fictional, I had absolutely no invested interest in seeing them live and that ultimately made the film something I couldn?t get into or ingrain myself in.

They're both screaming about how we need to leave Britney alone.
In internet years, that reference is ancient.

My final issue with the film came in the morals and themes it is tossing out and how easily it is to turn them against themselves.  On the surface, Unfriended is about how awful bullying is?most notably cyber-bullying.  I said I didn?t like how the characters were unlikable and it?s clear the film is saying, ?You?re not suppose to like them because they?re bullies and we?re showing how bullying is bad.?  That?s great but, on the different side of the same coin, they accidentally created the ultimate victim blaming feature.  Laura, after being bullied to the point she takes her own life, comes back for revenge and is, by horror film standards, the bad guy.  So, underneath the film?s surface of saying bullying is bad, it?s in a roundabout way saying that Laura is the bad guy because she?s killing people.  As a friend of mine put it, they are literally demonizing the victim in this film.  Saying don?t bully people because they?ll become demons who kill you might become the next ?Don?t dress that way if you don?t want to get raped.?

But it does prove why you should not be dicks to people, so that's good.

Surprisingly, I did find Unfriended better than what I predicted it was going to be?granted, I still didn?t find it very entertaining but its acting was better than I thought it would be and the concept is fairly decent.  The problem I had?beyond how silly it was that their video chat connection lagged as bad as it did (Did they have dial-up?)?was with the film?s execution.  It?s a unique idea but within its uniqueness came a new set of problems like scares that just weren?t scary and a moral that can easily be turned around.  Maybe these problems can be fixed with its sequel but if the film is just retreaded the same stuff we?ve already seen (like the Paranormal Activity franchise, a series that never stops repeating itself) then it will just end up being another clich?d horror franchise for the pile.